My writing life has afforded me travel to places I would not normally see, and to meet people who during my lifetime would quite possibly have remained strangers.
In 2007, a 15-miles-away newspaper family hired me to write a 10-week dining series. While saddled with these assignments, I visited nearby spots both prior to and after interviews to self-educate myself about the locale. One of these was a tiny cemetery resting -- I use that word appropriately; I rarely saw another person there, and normally birds hopped along the grass and flew into the trees when I arrived -- next to a Reformed church. During one visit on a warm day, I saw an elderly gentleman tending to a gravesite, standing to inspect his work, and the slowly dropping to his knees again to perfect the care allotted. I approached him slowly and we began to talk. The grave belonged to his wife, who had died the prior year. He told me he missed her immensely, a pain I could see on his face and hear in his voice, and as he described her illness and eventual passing, I looked at the marker, her side bearing a date of birth and date of death, his just the former. As we stood there together, just he and I alone in the quiet graveyard, I wondered how long his wait would be to join her. And five years later, when job obligations returned me to the area, I made a quick stop and checked in to see if he now had passed. He hadn't. Recently, I and my daughter have started to write for the a relatively new publication family in the same area, and recently I attended a meeting near the cemetery and, as is my habit, I arrived in town well before the event was to begin. Extra time on hand, I trekked the short drive to the quiet lot, to see how my elderly friend I had met 11 years earlier had fared. I drove the car into the cemetery, parked near where I thought his wife's burial spot had been, and began to search. I couldn't find it. I looked around, tried to calculate where among the somewhat high grass he and I had met, and started to walk in another direction. Finally, I found it, the marker the same as it had been back in 2007. However, the gravesite had changed; fresh dirt now lay in front of the marker, grass seed dotting it. I wondered if the elderly gentleman's day of tending to the spot were complete, and perhaps that he had now passed and joined his wife in eternity. I returned to my car, turned on my Smartphone, and entered the man's name and "- obituary." He had passed in January 2018. As I sat in my car, I thought about the passing of time, and how that passage means the passing of and saying goodbye to people. My words with this man were few, but I've occasionally pondered how often he returned home, his wife no longer there except perhaps for memories held of her in photos, her favorite chair still sitting beside his, maybe articles of clothing in the closet which he found it hard to part with. His work, his worry is over now. His love shown should live in all. Steve
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Steve Sears is a New Jersey based freelance writer
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